I have long been aware of RSS. i tried subscribing to some feeds from time-to-time; however, I never found an RSS reader that I really liked. I tried Google Reader when it first came out, and i don't remember being particular impressed by it. I don't actually remember what I didn't like by it, but I didn't use it for several years.

I enjoy a good cola and long ago discovered that colas, even of the same brand, taste different depending on whether they come from a can, a plastic bottle, a glass bottle or from a fountain. Taste also varies between different fountain machines that dispense the same brand of cola.

While Coca-Cola is usually my favorite cola, I enjoy a good RC Cola from time-to-time. So I was excited earlier this year to run across a restaurant in the western suburbs of Chicago that has RC in its fountain machine. I bought a large RC, but was surprised by how horrible it tasted. It has an unusual bubble gum-like aftertaste and tasted almost completely different from the canned variety of RC with which I was familiar.

Then while on vacation this June, I was in a convenience store in northern Idaho that also had RC on tap. Since I knew how varied the taste of other colas from fountains were, I decided to give RC another chance but was again disappointed. It had the same weird bubble gum taste.

The final straw came yesterday. I ate lunch at El Famous Burrito in Vernon Hills, Illinois and found they also have fountain RC. I decided to give RC one last chance, but it failed test challenge again: same bubble gum aftertaste. Three strikes and you are out, fountain RC, but I will still enjoy RC in cans and glass bottles.

In June 2009, I drove to the National N Scale Convention in Portland, Oregon. After the convention I took some time to explore the west coast. In total, I drove over 8000 miles, passed through thirteen states and two Canadian provinces, and visited 10 national parks. I've posted photographs from my 2009 West Coast Road Trip

Early this spring, I noticed two adult geese leading around three goslings outside my office building. I watched these geese grow up in and around a pond near my office through late spring and early summer. Here are some blurry pictures of my Canada geese.

After walking away last night disgusted by the state of the vnc4 package in Ubuntu, it occurred to me to try the regular Debian version of the package. I'm happy to report that it worked. I patched the bug that was causing vnc4config to crash on startup, rebuilt, and I am now happily cutting-and-pasting again.

So I bought into the hype and decided to try out the professional Debian-based Linux distribution Ubuntu. You'd think that since someone presumably pays Canonical to create releases of their platform there would be at least some basic quality control in their release procedure, even something as simple as making sure all of the source packages in the distribution actually build; however, this does not appear to be the case.

There is a pretty simple bug in the vnc4server package when running on 64-bit systems. This bug was first reported to Canonical almost two years ago, and the fix has been known for sometime: it is as simple as moving an include outside of extern "C". Despite having a known fix this bug remains unclosed.

So fine, I know what the fix, and vnc4server is open source, so I think I'll just fix it myself. But no, the vnc4 source code included in Canonical's Jaunty release cannot be built from source. The package has dependencies on packages that are not even available in the Jaunty release, and once I worked around, I found that the xserver code included in the package is so old that it can't be built on Jaunty either. I've now wasted hours dealing with this: all so I can cut-and-paste between my vnc windows and my Windows box.

As you may have noticed, I recently re-enabled comments on my websites. Almost as soon as I had finished this effort, I started getting spam comments. How there are bots out there that found my website and decoded what it took to post a comment, I don't think I'll ever know.

The common way to fight automated posting is through the use of CAPTCHAs. These operate on the premise that there are things that humans can read that are still things that are exceedingly hard for computers to decipher. After encountering the spam problem, I decided to investigate adding CAPTCHAs for the comments.

I was worried that it would be hard to add CAPTCHAs to my site because, due to a design decision I made over six years ago, all of the pages on my site are static HTML pages that are generated by a back end perl script. My concern is that CAPTCHAs would require dynamic HTML to be generated for all of the comment posting pages; however, I quickly found this not to be the case with reCAPTCHA. The dynamic side of reCAPTCHA all exists on a remote server: I just had to add a few lines of HTML to pull in some remote JavaScript. All in all, between the few lines of HTML for the comment posting form and the back end script that process the comments, I only had to change about 10 lines of code.

Of course this will only help until someone rights a better computer vision algorithm that can figure out the words in the images. Oh well.

The other nice thing about reCAPTCHA is that it is actually used to help with the electronic scanning of books.

So I only updated my website twice in 2005—once in January and once in February; so sue me. I’m lazy.

I guess the biggest news from last year is that I started my first real job on July 18, 2005. I’m now a full time employee of Motorola, Inc. I’m a senior software engineer at Motorola’s design center in Champaign, Illinois. Doesn’t the senior part of the title sound impressive?

I’m also still in school. I’ve completed the class work part of the Ph.D. program; so classes don’t interfere with my full time employment. Essentially I come home from a full day of work at Motorola, and put in several more hours of work on my Ph.D. thesis.

The operating system I’m working with for my thesis, Choices, is beginning to take on more of the aspects you’d expect from an OS.

Between Motorola and schoolwork, I also had time to do lots of other things in 2005.

Presidential Inauguration

In January, I went to President Bush’s second presidential inauguration with my friends Sarah and Naomi. They had recently moved to the DC area, and somehow managed to get tickets. We were closer than a lot of people, but the only view of the president we had was on a big screen TV. I also visited my friend Ellen who had also recently moved to DC.

Great River Road

For Spring Break, I drove the Great River Road along the eastern bank of the Mississippi River from Cairo, Illinois to Venice, Louisiana. My friend Brent happened to be in New Orleans for a conference about hurricanes—at the time, Brent, was working for the city engineer’s office in Gulfport, Mississippi. Brent had an extra bed in his room at the Hilton in downtown New Orleans, so my stay in New Orleans was free.

I’m thinking about repeating this trip again this year to see how much things have changed. Brent survived the hurricane season just fine and is now working for a private engineering firm.

Railmania

I went a bit crazy with railroad related things last year—both model and full scale. I visited a number of railroad museums and numerous train shows. Among these shows, I went to the Galesburg Railroad Days in June and the National Train Show in July. I also constructed a small N scale model railroad layout on a two foot by four foot base. Now I need to save some money from my new job so I can buy a house and have a bigger place to put my model trains.

My railroading highlight of the year was Throttle Time at the Monticello Railway Museum in Monticello, Illinois. For a small donation, the museum lets patrons operated one of their locomotives. For my Throttle Time, I ran the museum’s RS-3 locomotive. My train consisted of a gondola, a streamlined passenger car, and a Wabash Railroad caboose. My friends Ellick, Francis, and Moosa joined me on the trip to museum. Francis road in the cab of the locomotive and took pictures while Ellick and Moosa hitched a ride in the caboose.

St. Louis 200B Reunion

I got together with my former roommates from 200B several times last year. For Labor Day, I met up with Chris, J.D., Kyle, and Ryan in St. Louis. J.D. and I were the last to leave town; after everyone else left we took a leisurely boat ride on the Mississippi River and toured the Budweiser Brewery.

J.D. joked that he experienced every form of transportation that weekend. He flew into town, rode around town in a car, visited a railroad museum, and took a boat ride.

More Photos

Email

No update to this website would be complete without a graph showing the amount of email I get; so click above for an analysis of two years of email.

Holidays and 2006

Having a full time job had a predictable impact on the amount of time I spent at home in Kentucky for the holiday’s this year. I was barely home at all. I had Thanksgiving Day and the day after Thanksgiving off; as well as two days at Christmas time. I wasn’t able to take any vacation time off from work until the middle of January. I went a road trip to Key West for that vacation. Given my track record, I’ll post my pictures from that sometime in 2007.

Well my giant bow made it through the Christmas season. When I returned from Thanksgiving Break, I found it lying in front of a vent along the sidewalk outside of my apartment. At first, I thought it had been ripped down by a person, but further investigation lead me to believe it had been ripped down by the wind. I re-attached the bow—this time more securely, and it survived until I took down my decorations on January 9.

I’ve been a model railroad kick since Christmas. I purchased an N gauge model of L&N #777 (an E6A locomotive) and have setup an oval track in my apartment. You can usually see this on my webcam. I’ll be adding more to my model railroad as time and money become available.

Back in October of 2001, just two months after I moved into my apartment, my vacuum cleaner died while I was attempting to clean my apartment before my friend David came up from Bowling Green for the ACMís Reflections|Projections conference. The vacuum didnít catch fire, but it did smoke. In order to avoid having to live with the smell of the burnt out vacuum, I decided to sit it outside, against the building, in front of my car. When I woke up the next morning the vacuum cleaner was gone.

Now as far as I was concerned the vacuum cleaner was worthless; however, I have always wondered if perhaps the thief would plug in the vacuum and have it catch on fire. Wouldnít that be justice? Since that time Iíve been convinced that anything set outside my apartment is destined to be quickly stolen. I have decided to test this hypothesis by attaching a large red bow to my door. I installed the bow just before 6:45pm today November 15, 2004. I will report back here when it is stolen.

Iíve also taken some trips of which I have no photographic evidence. I explored the Richardson Corn Maze in Spring Grove, Illinois, and I attended the Pumpkin Festival in Morton, Illinois. After the Pumpkin Festival, I followed the Illinois River from Peoria to Alton. I also went to St. Louis on October 8, and stood outside of the debate site to show my support for President Bush.